New story in Science and Health from Time: China’s New Space Station Is Set to Welcome Its First Crew China’s New Space Station Is Set to Welcome Its First Crew

JIUQUAN, China — The three members of the first crew to be sent to China’s space station say they’re eager to get to work making their home for the next three months habitable, setting up testing and experiments and preparing for a series of spacewalks.

The three met with reporters Wednesday from inside a germ-free glassed-in room, hours before they are due to blast off on Thursday morning.

“First of all, we need to arrange our home in the core module, then get started on a whole range of diagnostic tests on crucial technology and experiments,” said mission commander Nie Haisheng, the most senior of the three who is making his third trip to space.
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“The task is very arduous and there are many challenges. My colleagues and I will cooperate closely, operate carefully and overcome all difficulties,” Nie said.

Unsurprisingly, all said they had complete confidence in the mission, which carries special political meaning for the ruling Communist Party as it prepares to celebrate its centenary next month.

Liu Boming, whose one previous flight in 2011 included China’s first spacewalk, said there would be multiple such activities during the mission as the astronauts carry out their science experiments, conduct maintenance and prepare the Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, core module to receive two other modules to be sent up next year.

Tang Hongbo, who is making his first flight since being selected among the second batch of astronauts in 2010, said he had been training virtually non-stop for years. “There is pressure,” Tang said. “But where there is pressure there is motivation and … I have confidence in myself and have confidence in our team.”

Thursday’s launch begins the first crewed space mission in five years for an increasingly ambitious space program. China has sent 11 astronauts into space since becoming the third country to so so on its own in 2003, and has sent orbiters and rovers to the moon and Mars.

The astronauts will be traveling in the Shenzhou-12 spaceship launched by a Long March-2F Y12 rocket set to blast off at 9:22 a.m. (0122 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch center in northwestern China.

While the first Tianhe crew are men, women will be part of future crews, officials have said.

Beijing doesn’t participate in the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. concerns over the Chinese program’s secrecy and its military connections. Despite that, foreign science missions and possibly foreign astronauts are expected to visit the Chinese station in future, China Manned Space Agency Assistant Director Ji Qiming told reporters at Jiuquan.

“Outer space is the common wealth of people all over the world, and exploring the universe is the shared cause of all mankind,” Ji said.

“We are willing to carry out international cooperation and exchanges with all countries and regions worldwide that are committed to the peaceful use of outer space,” Ji said, adding that existing cooperation with countries including Russia, Italy and Germany along with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs was being expanded.

“I believe that in the near future, when the Chinese space station is complete, we will see Chinese and foreign astronauts taking on joint missions to the Chinese space station,” Ji said.

Ji conceded the construction of the Chinese station had come “relatively late,” but said that was also an advantage in that it allowed China to use the latest technologies and concepts, particularly in the areas of reliability and safety.

“Exploring the vast universe, developing space activities building a powerful space nation is our unremitting space dream,” Ji said.

“The construction and operation of China’s space station will raise our technologies and accumulate experience for all the people. It is a positive contribution by China for human exploration of the universe, peaceful utilization of outer space and push forward the building of a community of shared future for mankind,” he said.

The mission is the third of 11 planned through next year to add the additional sections to the station and send up crews and supplies. The main living section of the station was launched in April while the other two modules will be primarily for scientific work.

The mission builds on experience China gained from operating two experimental space stations earlier. It also landed a probe on Mars last month that carried a rover, the Zhurong, and earlier landed a probe and rover on the moon and brought back the first lunar samples by any country’s space program since the 1970s.

Once completed, the station will allow for stays of up to six months, similar to the much larger International Space Station.

Each astronaut will have their own living area and a stationary bike and other exercise equipment will allow them to counter some of the effects of weightlessness. They’ll also be able to bring personal items to remind them of home and stave off boredom while not working, Nie said.

The Chinese station reportedly is intended to be used for 15 years and may outlast ISS, which is nearing the end of its functional lifespan.

The launch of Tianhe was considered a success although China was criticized for allowing the uncontrolled reentry to Earth of part of the rocket that carried it into space. Usually, discarded rocket stages reenter the atmosphere soon after liftoff, normally over water, and don’t go into orbit.

The rocket blasting off Thursday is of a different type, and Ji dismissed concerns about it or the models used for cargo missions posing a threat when they reenter. China published their trajectories and they are expected to burn up long before they could be a danger, he said.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Delta Variant Could Soon Become the Dominant COVID-19 Strain. Here’s What You Need to Know The Delta Variant Could Soon Become the Dominant COVID-19 Strain. Here’s What You Need to Know

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly becoming an arms race among the emerging variants of the virus, and at the moment, there’s no question which one is winning: the Delta variant—formally known as B.1.617.2—one of four strains to have emerged originally in India. It was just last month that the World Health Organization labeled Delta a “variant of concern”—joining with the Alpha strain, which emerged in the U.K.; the Beta strain, from South Africa; and the Gamma strain, first seen in Brazil. But Delta is fast becoming the most worrisome of the bunch.

Health officials are sounding the alarm that Delta threatens to reverse the progress made in countries, like the U.S. and U.K., that have lately been beating the pandemic into retreat and worsen conditions in countries, like India, that are still deep in crisis. Researchers have found that Delta is at least 60% more transmissible within households than the Alpha strain, the dominant variant in the U.S., according to the Public Health of England.
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According to accounts from doctors on state-run television in China—which were first reported in English media by the New York Times—Delta-variant patients there have seen symptoms develop more quickly and grow more severe than those in people infected with other variants. Viral loads also climb faster and decline more slowly. Still, epidemiologists say it may be too soon to know for certain if Delta causes more severe illness, and it’s important to recognize that other factors, like lockdown restrictions and vaccination rates, may be affecting disease spread as well. “I’m pretty wary of putting too many eggs in the basket of ‘the variants are making things worse’” says Dr. Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s very convenient for some political leaders to blame variants like an act of God for policy decisions that have led to the situation that we find ourselves in.”

In the U.S., the Delta variant now represents roughly 6% of all cases, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Those numbers are likely to climb. “I think that with the data we have, there’s a good chance that it could take over the 117 [Alpha strain] as the primary variant just because it’s more infectious,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s going to create a real additional challenge.”

At a White House briefing last week, Fauci noted that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 88% effective in preventing disease caused by the Delta variant. “The good news is that the Delta variants, just like the other variants, do not appear to escape the protection afforded by the vaccines available in the U.S.,” says Dr. Gronvall. In addition, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is authorized for use in the E.U. but not in the U.S., has been shown to be 60% effective against the Delta variant, according to a study published in Nature, though scientists expect even greater protection against hospitalization and death caused by the strain.

But in the interim, as populations remain significantly unvaccinated, the Delta variant’s infectiousness is cause for concern. The U.K. government had set June 21 as the target date for reopening the country, but earlier today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced it will be postponed at least a month. The extra time will allow at least 10 million more doses of vaccine to be administered, according to U.K. Health Minister Edward Argar. So far, 62% of the U.K. population has received at least one vaccine dose and 44% are fully vaccinated.

But even if 10 million doses are indeed successfully administered over the next month, there’s no guarantee breakthrough infections won’t occur.

In response to the spread of the Delta variant in the U.K., other European nations have imposed additional travel restrictions on visitors from the country.

In China, the Delta crisis is centered around the city of Guangzhou in the southeastern part of the country, where the government has imposed restrictions not seen since the earliest days of the pandemic. The government has administered an estimated 32 million COVID-19 tests in the southeast, including to the entire 18.7-million-person population of Guangzhou (the region’s largest city) in an effort to get the outbreak under control. The tests in Guangzhou were conducted over just three-days from June 5 to 7.

So far, 800 million doses of vaccine have been administered across all of China, according to the Chinese news outlet XINHUANET. But that is total doses—not necessarily including second doses, which the widely used Sinovac vaccine requires—and in any event represents just 57% of the population.

And vaccination numbers are much lower in much of the rest of the world, exposing millions to highly transmissible and potentially more dangerous variants, and creating fresh opportunities for the SARS-CoV-2 to shape-shift yet again. “Every time you’re giving the virus a chance to replicate, you’re giving a chance for another variant to take hold, which may have different properties that are not to our advantage,” says Dr. Gronvall. “That is why it is in our self interest to help vaccinate the world.”

In the U.S., cases of the Delta variant are doubling every two weeks, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the Food and Drug Administration, who spoke to CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “It’s essentially taking over,” warned Fauci flatly at a June 8 White House briefing. The answer, he reiterated, is to get people vaccinated—at least up to the 70% level needed to achieve herd immunity.

Osterholm is not optimistic that can happen, given the low rate of vaccination to date, especially in southern and Appalachian states like Georgia, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Some of those states—Alabama, Arkansas and Missouri, for instance—have seen cases rise in recent weeks, and Osterholm says the situation is particularly worrying in so-called “vaccine deserts” within those states where vaccination rates are even lower. There, it’s possible that Delta transmission could fuel local COVID-19 case spikes that overwhelm the regional medical system.

“We have to be careful not to automatically just assume what’s happened in England will happen here,” he says. Nonetheless, he adds, “The risk is surely greater when you have more unvaccinated people together. I think that as we open up everything we’re kind of back in many ways to where we were back in pre-March 2020.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: How Whales Can Teach Us to Be Better Humans How Whales Can Teach Us to Be Better Humans

For the last 23 years, I’ve traveled around the world as a wildlife photographer and photojournalist.

The pandemic ground all that to a halt. Like most of us, I was home for more than a year. In that time, I reflected on what I’ve learned during those two-plus decades of non-stop travel.

My last trip, which ended in March 2020, was part of a three-year project photographing whales that focused on their culture and behaviors.

I came away with a striking observation. Genetically identical species of whales behave differently depending on where they live—much like humans. They form clans with unique dialects or languages. They develop cultural food preferences. They showcase special parenting techniques. They even hold singing competitions.
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More importantly, they pass on these ancestral traditions to their calves. Not only are they teaching their children survival skills—they’re passing on their culture.

I also saw these sentient, highly intelligent animals display other typically human behaviors. They have personalities and celebrate their identity. Some whale species give their calves names and greet each other when they meet. They show love, empathy, and grief.

Family is immensely important to them. Within orca families, individuals live nearly five times longer if grandmothers are present.

Take sperm whales. These animals are shy and gentle—quite counter to their popular portrayal in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. They roam the open ocean and spend most of their lives in the deep sea, searching for squid to feed on. They may spend much of their day in solitude. But they also have families led by the older, wiser females of the group.

These whales are especially challenging to study. But spend enough time with them, and you’ll see them occasionally gather as a family to socialize near the surface. I’ve been privileged to be in the water with them during these times. What I saw can only be described as love. They roll around together, rubbing against one another, gently biting and playing. They close their eyes and delight in each other’s company.

Brian SkerryA family unit of sperm whales socializing underwater off the island of Faial in the Azores.

For an animal that spends most of its life in a three-dimensional liquid void, rarely touching anything, I imagine that these moments are pure joy. Although their lives in the ocean are difficult, they’ve learned to make time for each other. This alone must bring them bliss.

Perhaps my favorite observation took place in the Canadian Arctic with beluga whales. This population of belugas spends its winters in total darkness in the waters near Greenland. In the summer, when it is light 24 hours a day, they swim hundreds of miles through the Northwest Passage to reach their summer playground. It’s near land, where the water is shallow and slightly warmer. To produce images in these conditions, my team and I had to design and build new, remote cameras that I placed underwater before the whales arrived.

The photographic results exceeded our wildest expectations. But one aspect of their lives was a complete surprise—they play games with little rocks. In this shallow, three-foot-deep water, belugas will occasionally pick up pebbles with their mouths. They’ll carry them around for a while, and then drop them. Another whale then swims by to pick the pebble up again.

Ever since I captured these images, I’ve thought often about these polar whales living far away, at the top of the Earth. Their daily lives are busy and challenging. They have to catch food and take care of their young. They deal with social situations, where no doubt conflicts occur. And they have to face predators and serious threats every day. Yet they still make time to play. They find a perfect pebble and carry it around because it makes them happy. How wonderful is that?

We can see ourselves in these creatures. Humans also speak different languages, enjoy different foods, and pass down family traditions.

But perhaps most strikingly, we also rely on one other. The moments we spend with our loved ones are often the most treasured and meaningful in our lives. Just as belugas do, in between the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, it’s essential for us to make time for other things—things that bring joy.

In other words, every now and then, each of us should pause our days and find that perfect pebble. My guess is that decades from now, they’ll be what we cherish the most.

New story in Science and Health from Time: What Meghan and Harry’s New Daughter Needs to Know About Being a Second-Born What Meghan and Harry’s New Daughter Needs to Know About Being a Second-Born

Lilibet ‘Lili’ Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, the new daughter of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, was born on Friday, June 4, weighing in at a healthy 7 lbs., 11 oz and, according to a statement issued by the parents, “both mother and child are healthy and well, and settling in at home.”

So all good for the second child of two people who are arguably the most glamorous couple in the world, right? Well, maybe not. There’s that whole second child thing to deal with, and whether you’re glam or not, royal or not, rich or poor, boy or girl, globally famous or entirely anonymous, that can present particular challenges. As I wrote in both my book The Sibling Effect and in a 2007 TIME magazine cover story, the dice of life are loaded in favor of first borns in ways they simply aren’t for any siblings who come along later.
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First-borns are over represented at Ivy League colleges, in the halls of Congress, in CEO suites, even in the early astronaut corps. They tend to earn more than later borns, enjoy better health throughout their lives—likely as a result of parents finding health care dollars being stretched tighter and tighter as more children come along—and even have a three-point IQ advantage over second borns, according to one study out of Norway (that brain-power edge is thought to come from first borns becoming better masters of skills as they mentor younger siblings).

First borns also tend to be more conservative and family oriented than later-borns. And why not? They’re born into a system in which they’re the sole princeling or princess—more or less literally, in the case of the U.K. royal family, but mostly metaphorically for the rest of us. But still, they inherit the sweet deal as the prime child, and consciously or not, devote their lives to maintaining that privileged post.

Second and later borns are much more invested in upending the system. Research has shown that they are likelier to be risk-takers—skydivers and bungee jumpers as opposed to skiers and polo players. Even when siblings play the same sport, younger ones are likelier to take the higher-risk positions—baseball catchers instead of outfielders, football tackles instead of kickers. Younger siblings are disproportionately represented among artists, too, and are likelier to be gamble-it-all entrepreneurs as opposed to following more traditional, climb-the-trellis routes to the C-suites of an existing organization.

Sibling combat plays another big part of the big-sib, little-sib dynamic. Here too, royals or not, Archie and Lilibet could be due for some rough times together. One study out of the University of Illinois I cited in The Sibling Effect found that during a 45-minute play session, the average pair of children in the three- to seven-year-old age group engage in more than 2.5 conflicts. That’s 3.5 every hour, or one every 17 minutes. A related Canadian study focused on siblings from two to four years old, finding that hostilities among that age group break out an astonishing 6.3 times per hour—one fight every 9.5 minutes.

The advantage in this playroom warfare ought to go to the older—and typically physically bigger—sibling, but that’s not always the case. Younger siblings, research shows, deploy what are known as “low-power strategies,” developing a better ability to read other people’s visual and tonal cues and intuit what they’re thinking—the better to duck a punch before it comes their way. They also tend to be funnier, which matters a lot. As I observed in my book, it’s awfully hard to resist the charms of someone who can make you laugh, and families abound with stories of last-borns who are the clowns of the brood. Birth-order scholars observe that some of history’s great satirists—Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain—were among the youngest members of large families, a pattern that continues today. Stephen Colbert, who yields to no one in his ability to get a laugh, often points out that he’s the last of 11 children.

What Lilibet has to watch out for are some of younger children’s less adaptive traits. History is rife with little siblings of world leaders getting themselves into all kinds of scrapes—take, for instance, the serial scandals of Roger Clinton, Donald Nixon and Billy Carter, little brothers of U.S. presidents Bill, Richard and Jimmy, respectively. Prince Harry himself, little brother to heir to the throne Prince William, had his own series of embarrassments—boozing, pot-smoking, wearing a Nazi uniform at a costume party, and wearing nothing at all in a notorious picture snapped while he was playing pool with friends in a Las Vegas hotel room.

None of this means that baby Lili and toddler Archie are doomed to face all of these challenges. Meghan’s and Harry’s decision to step back from royal life means the children may be exposed to less glare from the press—especially the toxic kind that contributed to the mixed-race, British-American family’s decision to decamp to the U.S.—as well as from the constant public ceremonies and all of the other force multipliers of psychic stress. But the science of birth order is the science of birth order, and the studies are the studies. So welcome to the world, little Lili. Your advantages will be considerable; your challenges will be common to all little siblings. May you make the most of the first, and may you deftly navigate the second.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Why Jeff Bezos Should Be Applauded for Going to Space Why Jeff Bezos Should Be Applauded for Going to Space

Give Jeff Bezos this: the guy knows how to make the most out of semi-retirement. On July 5, the richest man in the world will step down as Amazon CEO to focus more of his energy on his two other major properties: The Washington Post and Blue Origin, a rocket company and SpaceX rival. On July 20—just 15 days after he gets his gold watch and, not incidentally, 52 years to the day after Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon—Bezos is set to go to space himself, joining five other people aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft on its inaugural crewed flight.
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And you know what? Bravo for Bezos.

Is the fight a stunt—an exercise in exhibitionism for a man worth north of $170 billion who builds his own rocket ships and can jolly well climb aboard one if he wants? Maybe. In a year in which the world’s true heroes have been the health care workers fighting on the front lines of the worst pandemic in a century, should we care about a little hop to suborbital space? Maybe not.

Still, space is hard, the physics can be brutal—you try pulling the g-forces astronauts endure—and the machines can and do blow up. But with private companies like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and more working to build an entirely new industry in space tourism, and with consumers opening their wallets to buy seats on the rockets, somebody has to go first, and Bezos—give him props—is stepping forward.

“To see the Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth,” Bezos said in an Instagram post. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”

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A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)

Bezos’ brother Mark, a senior vice president at the New York-based charity Robin Hood, will also be on board, as will four others—one of whom will be chosen via online auction; the bidding currently stands at $2.8 million. The flight they take will be short, thrilling and, depending on your view of these things, scary.

I had a chance to climb inside a mockup of a New Shepard on the Blue Origin factory floor in Kent, Wash. in 2019. Even for the most risk-averse people—and I count myself among them—it’s hard not to want to take it for a spin. The cockpit is a circular pod with half a dozen couches arranged around the periphery, each with a window significantly larger than the little portholes on commercial airliners. The headroom is considerable, with ample space above the couches in which to unbuckle and float during the brief weightless portion of the trip.

The flight that Bezos and, eventually, a whole clientele of Blue Origin customers will take begins with a launch atop the 18 m (59-ft.) New Shepard rocket from the company’s site southeast of El Paso, Texas. Two minutes into the flight, the rocket reaches Mach 3—or three times the speed of sound—and the crew will feel a force of 3 Gs. One minute later, as the New Shepard approaches the 100 km (62 mi) altitude mark—the commonly accepted boundary of space—the crew capsule will separate from the rocket. At that point, weightlessness will begin, and the crew will unbuckle and float freely around the cockpit. At the four-minute mark, the capsule will reach the peak of its parabolic flight and then begin to descend back into the atmosphere. Shortly after—having experienced about three minutes of zero-g—the crew will rebuckle and the capsule will descend by parachute while the booster touches down softly on a landing pad about 3.2 km from the launch site. The capsule lands not far away. The entire mission duration? Just 11 minutes.

Blue Origin has worked hard to eliminate as much risk from the exercise as possible. The New Shepard had its 15th successful test flight in April, and a suborbital mission is about the safest flight profile a spacecraft can fly—a simple up and down lob shot. But there’s still the giant fuel tanks filled with explosive liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the supersonic velocities the rocket reaches and the fact that lob shots—simple as they are—sometimes wind up making holes in the ground.

Bezos is willing to take those chances before he asks the same of the passengers he hopes will be queuing up behind him. Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic, has not yet flown on one of his own company’s space vehicles, though he plans to later this year. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has never flown aboard one of his company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, and was quite frank about that when I spoke to him back in 2012, saying that his considerable responsibilities on Earth—not least as head of both SpaceX and Tesla—make that a potentially imprudent risk.

Bezos, who will become executive chairman of Amazon’s board after he leaves the CEO job, has considerable responsibilities too, but he’s going anyway. Flying fast is fun. Flying first is brave. The mission planned for July 20 may well be just a billionaire’s indulgence. But if so, it’s being flown by a billionaire showing more than a little integrity.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The U.S. Government’s Long-Awaited UFO Report Is Here. Its Findings? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The U.S. Government’s Long-Awaited UFO Report Is Here. Its Findings? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The U.S. Navy pilots flying maneuvers in their F/A-18 Super Hornets in 2015 did not have to wait for yesterday’s leak of the classified government report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)—better known as UFOs—to know that they were seeing things they could not explain outside their windscreens. The objects were, yes, saucer-shaped, and they were bobbing, darting and changing directions with a speed and nimbleness that no known technology could manage.

“Look at that thing, dude!” one pilot shouted. “Oh my gosh. There’s a whole fleet of them. They’re going against the wind! The wind’s 120 knots [135 mph] west!”
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Cockpit cameras captured what the crew was seeing, and in 2020, the Pentagon declassified the footage. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about what the crew saw that day was how unremarkable it was becoming. In the past 20 years, military pilots have made more than 120 sightings of objects with no apparent signs of conventional propulsion—no exhaust or contrails, and certainly no wings or fins.

In 2007, Congress established the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program Task Force, championed by then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid, charging the intelligence department with determining if the objects really are extraterrestrial in origin or—perhaps worse—advanced military technology being developed by China, Russia or other potential foes.

That program shut down for lack of funding in 2012. But the work resumed last year, when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that also required the Pentagon to continue investigating UAPs and release its findings to the public. That release is tentatively set for later this month, but the New York Times published a copy yesterday, and the conclusions are just enough to intrigue everyone and satisfy no one: There is no evidence that the UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin, but nor can that possibility be ruled out.

The report says definitively that the objects are not American military craft, but pointedly does not discount the possibility that they could belong to another earthly nation. Both Russia and China are known to be experimenting with hypersonic technology—vehicles and weapons that can move at five times the speed of sound or faster—and certainly the velocity of the objects seen by American pilots would be consistent with that kind of engineering. But the suddenness with which the objects change directions would—or at least should—cause g-forces that would rip them (or their inhabitants) apart, and the length of time some of them remain aloft goes beyond what conventional fuel technology could support.

“These things would be out there all day,” one pilot told the Times. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.” Other objects sighted have done other extraordinary things, including diving from the air into the ocean and back out, once again at seemingly fatal speeds.

Those kinds of so-far inexplicable abilities have caught the attention of a lot of people who normally keep their distance from what could be seen as fringe beliefs.

“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” former President Barack Obama said May 17 on The Late Late Show with James Corden. During her presidential campaign in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about any classified data that might exist on UAPs and how she would handle it as President. “I want to open the files as much as we can,” she said. “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is also on the record as wanting more information on UAPs.

But others with deep expertise in space-related matters are simply not persuaded that there is anything otherworldly to be found from investigating the UAP sightings.

“As Carl Sagan said some time ago, extraordinary claims require for their validation extraordinary evidence,” John Logsdon, founder and longtime director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an email to TIME. “Apparently the government report says that there is no such evidence. So I continue to be agnostic about these phenomena, leaning strongly to thinking they are, one way or the other, of human origin.”

In the event that’s indeed the case, Logsdon believes that whatever the government learns will likely remain the government’s business. “If these observations are indeed related to highly classified national security activity,” he said, “I would not expect their origin to be revealed in an unclassified government report.”

More information will surely be forthcoming when the full report drops before the end of the month. But if Logsdon’s right, best to expect the unidentified aerial phenomena to remain unidentified.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Start of Hurricane Season Brings Anxieties to Central America, Still Reeling From Last Year’s Disasters The Start of Hurricane Season Brings Anxieties to Central America, Still Reeling From Last Year’s Disasters

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here.

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Tuesday was the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season, but across swaths of Central America, thousands of people still haven’t recovered from the last one. Last November, back-to-back hurricanes pummeled millions of people across the region, destroying infrastructure and cropland, and leveling thousands of homes. In regions of Honduras and Nicaragua, many of those displaced by Hurricanes Eta and Iota—Category 4 storms that hit within two weeks of each other in November—are still living in fragile temporary shelters, contending with a spike in COVID-19 cases and associated deaths in a region where less than 1% of the population has been vaccinated against the virus.
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And unfinished recovery efforts from the last disaster have made communities there more vulnerable to what may be coming next. For instance, rivers around San Pedro Sula in Honduras flooded their banks during the November hurricanes, and in many cases, water control systems haven’t been restored. That means even a smaller rainfall event could much more easily unleash disastrous flooding again.

And more rain is almost certainly on its way: Forecasters are predicting an above-average hurricane season this year, with between 13 and 20 named storms potentially forming. Last year, a record-breaking hurricane season saw 30 named storms in the Atlantic, the most ever, in the fifth consecutive year of above-average hurricane activity.

Climate change may at least partly account for that trend. Over the past hundred years, the surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean have risen, a phenomenon linked to climate change and humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Warmer waters tend to form storms with higher wind speeds and more rainfall, a trend that is likely to become more pronounced as the climate continues to grow warmer in coming years.

People living in the path of hurricanes and other powerful storms strong enough to merit naming by the meteorological authorities have seen the effects of those climate forces firsthand—and in some cases, have also suffered from a lack of local environmental mitigation measures, which could perhaps have lessened the severity of the disaster. In Honduras, for instance, massive deforestation has left many areas in the mountainous country more vulnerable to flooding and landslides. Climate refugees may soon be on their way, with observers predicting that the new devastation, unseen since Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras and Nicaragua more than 20 years ago, may bring tides of migrants to wealthier countries like the United States.

Adaptation strategies may be able to lessen some of the blows. Early warning systems in Nicaragua, for instance, enabled local authorities to begin evacuating vulnerable areas days before last November’s hurricanes made landfall, and the country reported just a fraction of the fatalities that resulted from a previous major hurricane about a decade earlier. Experts have suggested that homes be moved away from hillsides that could collapse in rainstorms, and that local populations should be relocated away from low-lying coastal areas. Also proposed would be to switch crops in flood-prone areas to more resistant species. Rice, for example, could survive flooding, while native maize cannot.

But those initiatives haven’t always been at the top of the agenda in regions beset by debt and widespread poverty. In the meantime, relief organizations are already planning for this new world of climate-worsened disasters. The International Red Cross, for instance, said in its 2021 global plan that climate change has prompted an “urgent” need to scale up humanitarian work to meet “unprecedented needs,” with the organization attempting to triple the size of its emergency disaster-relief fund in the next four years. At Project HOPE, relief organizers say that a warming climate is having a substantial effect on their work, with the organization expanding its emergency response teams and recruiting more volunteers in order to deploy to multiple disasters at a time. “Both the scale and the frequency of the disasters that we’re responding to are like nothing we’ve seen in our past,” says Project HOPE Americas Regional Director Andrea Dunne-Sosa. “It’s not only anticipated. It’s been happening.”